A person in a rented apartment must be able to lean out of his window and scrape off the masonry within arm’s reach. And he must be allowed to take a long brush and paint everything outside within arm’s reach. So that it will be visible from afar to everyone in the street that someone lives there who is different from the imprisoned, enslaved, standardised man who lives next door.

In his nude speeches of 1967 and 1968 Hundertwasser condemned the enslavement of humans by the sterile grid system of conventional architecture and by the output of mechanised industrial production.He rejected rationalism, the straight line and functional architecture. For Hundertwasser, human misery was a result of the rational, sterile, monotonous architecture. He called for a boycott of this type of architecture, and demanded instead creative freedom of building, and the right to create individual structures.In 1972 he published the manifesto Your window right — your tree duty. Planting trees in an urban environment was to become obligatory.

His idea of tree tenants meant basically something like this:

And it would look like this:

Hundertwasser’s first manifesto, published in 1953, was entitled The Straight Line Leads to the Downfall of Humanity. He proclaimed, The eyes’ nervous system perceives the infinite number of straight lines as acute dangers. Man grows mentally ill without knowing why. And An uneven floor is a melody to the feet. I need to repeat this:An uneven floor is a melody to the feet…!!!

Asked if he saw himself as a good architect, he said, No, I don’t… But the others are so bad!

And look at what he did to the heating plant in Vienna! (waste incineration heating plant, that is… it looks like smth out of a fairy tale)